Land Surface

This recipe is available via AutoAssess.

Overview

Permafrost thaw is an important impact of climate change, and is the source of a potentially strong Earth system feedback through the release of soil carbon into the atmosphere. This recipe provides metrics that evaluate the climatological performance of models in simulating soil temperatures that control permafrost.

The simulation of surface radiation is central to all aspects of model performance, and can often reveal compensating errors which are hidden within top of atmosphere fluxes. This recipe provides metrics that evaluate the skill of models’ spatial and seasonal distribution of surface shortwave and longwave radiation against the CERES EBAF satellite dataset.

Soil moisture is a critical component of the land system, controling surface energy fluxes in many areas of the world. This recipe provides metrics that evaluate the skill of models’ spatial and seasonal distribution of soil moisture against the ESA CCI soil moisture ECV.

Available recipes and diagnostics

The assessment code is available from the AutoAssess repository.

Note that there are various Land Surface recipes that have been migrated to ESMValTool as an example of the process of migrating AutoAssess assessments. These are:

User settings in recipe

There are no user settings for this recipe

Variables

tas (atmos, monthly mean, longitude latitude time)
tsl (land, monthly mean, longitude latitude time)
mrsos (land, monthly mean, longitude latitude time)
rsns (atmos, monthly mean, longitude latitude time)
rlns (atmos, monthly mean, longitude latitude time)
sftlf (mask, fixed, longitude latitude)

Observations and reformat scripts

2001-2012 climatologies (seasonal means) from CERES-EBAF Ed2.7.
1999-2008 climatologies (seasonal means) from ESA ECV Soil Moisture Dataset v1.

References

See ESMValTool recipes linked above.

Example plots

NAC plot for Land Surface area — Summary overview of metrics from the Land Surface assessment